I was reading today's Citizen. Today's edition has a column. by Barbara Yaffe on the subject of meat eating and the recent case of BSE ("Mad Cow Disease") in Alberta. Its mostly the usual drivel about how animals suffer in the meat system.

What I have always wondered though is what would happen if these people got their way. After all, if no one were eating meat or drinking milk, etc...the millions of livestock on farms in the Americas and in Europe would lose their raison d'etre. What then? They would all have to be slaughtered..every one of them. And not just the livestock, which are killed as a matter of course, but also the breeding stock, the milch cows and all. Millions of animals killed, and wasted, since no one would want to eat them.

And that brings us to another problem: how do we produce enough protein from non-animal sources to sustain all these people? Sure, there is soybean products...but that's something of a boutique industry now..producing for the 5 or so percent of the population who are vegetarians in North America. But enough to support the other 280 million or so North Americans? Another case of people who wish for something without understanding what they are really asking for.

As for me, I have to stand with a slogan I saw on a bumper sticker yesterday: "I love animals, they're delicious!"